Two years ago I found myself
accompanying a group of young people from Holy
Cross Lutheran
Church in Salem,
Oregon as they embarked on a mission trip to
Idaho Servant Adventures based out of Shoshone Base Camp in the Idaho panhandle. One of
the main premises of ISA is that the youth provide the leadership for
themselves—the adult chaperones and ISA counselors are there to provide a
measure of supervision but not to lead. I can remember walking into a home we
were supposed to help renovate when the eight or ten youth immediately looked
at me for direction. So, in one of my rare moments of wisdom, I took one of my
high school girls to help me get a cooler from the van and while walking back
to the house I said, “When we get back you’re in charge. You give the orders
and tell people which jobs they should be doing. I’m going to shut up and look
at you whenever anybody asks me what to do.” For half a second she seemed
concerned and then the worry faded. She could do this. The thing about ISA is
that every young person comes away knowing that they can do it.
One
more story that will bring us back around to the Gospel.
On that same trip,
later in the week, we were helping to clear a swath of land overrun by brush,
vines, and all manner of vegetation—you know, the kind with thorns and brambles
and little pokey things that will get you in the eye no matter how careful you
are. Again, I was working alongside eight high schoolers wielding power tools
and clippers. We were pruning back the forest so that it could be useful; so
that it could bear fruit; not the kind of fruit you can eat, but instead the
fruit of usefulness; we were turning the land into something that would benefit
those who came after us.
At
the same time, the youth were learning (even if they didn’t realize it) that
they could bear fruit as well. Today’s Gospel is concerned primarily with this
fruit-bearing, and the reason I address fruitfulness from the perspective of
mission is because it hits all the right buttons. The most significant reason
why we have mission trips—or service opportunities of any kind in the church—is
that it is one of those rare moments that combines everything that the church
is doing right. First, it is God-driven; its purpose is unashamedly about
serving God, and honestly, we don’t get enough of that in our daily lives. It’s
not everyday that we go somewhere or do something primarily because our faith
compels us. Mission trips are the exception.
Secondly, service projects provide unique moments of community. You know what
it’s like to live side-by-side with your neighbors, and you also know that
often those relationships are really just surface-level encounters with nothing
on the line. It’s only when something wonderful or horrible happens that
everybody comes together to support one another. The intentionality of mission is
again the exception to the rule. And thirdly, mission is about serving somebody
else before it is ever about us. Something amazing happens when we put service
to others before our wants and desires; suddenly, our wants and desires aren’t
gone, instead they are already fulfilled. All the while we thought that the
secret to happiness was getting everything that we want when in truth it is
giving away what we have for the happiness of others.
So,
here’s where the rubber meets the road for the Gospel. Jesus is the vine; we are the branches; God
is the vinegrower. Sounds good, but it’s challenging for us to tease what it
means to abide in the vine. Yes, have faith in Jesus, but the metaphor is so
much deeper than that. In order to abide in Jesus, as the Gospel says, you need
to be connected intimately with the vine. Everything that we do has to have a
clear identity in Christ. The reason I began with two stories about youth
is because our young people get it much better than the rest of us. They can
sniff out phony from a mile away. So, they understand exactly what Jesus is
saying about being the vine and the branches. When they feel plugged into Jesus,
everything about being a member of the church makes sense, but when they don’t
then no extreme hospitality or outreach will matter. There has to be something
on the line.
What
we do has to matter. We are branches—each and every one of us—but we are so
often ignorant of the vine. Instead of allowing God to prune our dead
weight we get it all backwards. We try to trim the branches ourselves. We see
all the things that we do wrong—all the mistakes that we make—and we try harder
and harder to fix ourselves. Never mind that the Gospel is about as clear as it
can be: you can’t fix yourself. Self-help is a misnomer, because the only way
to help yourself is to die to yourself, to give up your little desires for the
sake the other. The more time you spend contemplating your own belly button,
the less and less fruit you will bear.
On a grander level,
this is what the church does when it is at its worst. Instead of bearing
fruit by being the church in the best way we can be, which is preaching
salvation to the prisoners of sin, justice to the oppressed, care to the needy;
instead of imagining who is in need—spiritually, emotionally, and
physically—beyond our walls, we have turned inward and examined minute points
of doctrine and practice. We’ve concerned ourselves with how it’s always been
and how we never have enough: time, money, volunteers—you name it. And all the
while we’ve been doing it all backwards. The branches don’t trim themselves.
Rather, the branch is dependent on the vine and the vinegrower. It is God’s job
to trim the dead weight, not ours.
I keep coming back
to that area of wild growth in northern Idaho
and those youth clearing the land. They weren’t hacking away at the problems in
their own lives, not directly; instead, they were fixing problems that didn’t
have a thing to do with them. They were living out the Gospel for the sake of
those who were in need, and in doing so their branches were being trimmed
without even them ever realizing it.
Our youth have an
advantage over the rest of us, and not just because they are still being asked
to do intentional service on mission trips. Rather, their primary advantage
over the rest of us is that they haven’t yet decided how the world looks. They
haven’t found themselves a nice comfy branch on which to rest. They are willing
to go out on a limb, to test their strength and flexibility. They have an
advantage over the rest of us because they understand their need for support
outside of themselves and not merely within. They realize they can’t be both
the branch and the vinegrower. Their support has to come from others, and the
only difference between our youth and our adults on this matter is that they
realize this is true while we continue to put on the charade of autonomy.
Jesus is the vine.
All of us are the branches. So rather than making our youth, who understand
this better than we can hope, more like our adults, we have to seriously
consider how we—the adults—will be more like our youth. How will we put down
our machetes and start whacking away at problems other than our own? How will
we turn outside of ourselves for the sake of others? And probably most
important of all, what do we do that bears fruit? Where is the place in our
lives that we turn to remember that we are God’s children ourselves, where we
serve others and in-so-doing find ourselves?
These are the
questions before us. The answers are up to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment